When I was in high school, back in the Paleolithic, there were no gay kids. Oh, there were guys who were suspiciously well groomed with an interest in hairdressing and theater, and there were girls who were suspiciously into big dogs and pickups and landscaping and sports, but gay people lived elsewhere, not in our small city in the South.
Then they graduated high school and moved to the big city and let their freak flags fly. Because it turns out that ostracizing gay people and making it hard or even illegal to be gay doesn’t result in fewer gay people. It just results in closeted miserable gay people. The elders in our community back then in the Paleolithic thought that keeping gay away from the kids would make kids not-gay. Instead it just made for miserable closeted gay kids, some of whom ended up ending themselves.
Things are so much healthier for gay kids today. We need to keep it that way. Because back then, not all gay kids survived. And for that matter, that is still true in some families today.
— Badtux the “the gay agenda is live kids” Penguin
Of course, coming out of the closet has happened the racists, the Be-Evil capitalists (Shkreli, Sacklers among them), the Christofascists and so on. Say it loud, say it proud: I’m a True Believer and will burn YOU at stake.
I’m not glad they’ve come out from under their rocks and proudly host their Open Swamp Day, but perhaps it’s better to have them out where their evil is clear to everyone with a conscience and morals.
It can happen here, it is happening here
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I’m pretty sure I was in the same Stone Age high-school era as you were, Tux. It IS strange how unaware we were of so many sexual matters.
There was talk who who was queer — one thing I am now ashamed of is how I and a lot of others in my HS nicknamed this one effeminate, drama-club guy “the Leather Kid” because the French word for leather is “cuire.” (You can prolly work out how that is pronounced.) At least our slurs were literate. Thinking back on my high school classmates (which I rarely do because I detested that time) I can come up with at least three or four who I now realise were gay in some way. Not to mention a teacher or two.
Heck, the teacher who had the most profound influence on my life, who shaped me more than my own (violent neglectful military man) father had the classic makings of a paedophile (as it’s spelt Downundahere.) He was a 7th-grade social studies teacher who was super-involved with us kids, a free-thinker who inculcated us to think about ecology and lots of other topics that were cutting edge during the early 70s. Each summer, he’d take a group of boys on a weeks-long cross-country trip (if they had parents who could pony up the money, which was IIRC $1,200, a substantial sum at the time.) There were 10 of us in a Ford van with a pull-along 5th wheel trailer who went from D.C., through the Appalachians, across the Mississippi River, to Bourbon Street in N’Awlins, the Astrodome (when that was still a wonder of the sporting world), Las Vegas, all through the desert, a week-long raft trip down the Colorado River rapids in the Grand Canyon, hiking in the Sierra Nevada range, Disneyland and then flying back on a 747 (when THAT was a wonder of the aviation world.) A second group of boys flew out to meet him in L.A. and he took the trip with them in the reverse direction. Seeing so much of the country always made me feel like a well-rounded American; gave me a wellspring of confidence I carried throughout my life.
The teacher was like a big goofy kid. Sometimes he’d get silly and start calling out “Feely Meely, Feely Meely!” while tickling us. The teacher never did anything untoward to me, and I never heard anything evil about him from others in the group. Decades later, after the Cathoholic (sic) priest molestation scandal came out, I began to wonder about the teach. Was able to Oogle him a bit; even found out that a former student of his was making a documentary film about the guy. No stain to his reputation, so that’s all good. But Jeez, there is NO WAY that such an activity would be possible in today’s more sexually focused atmosphere.
I wonder whether there are NOW other deep social parameters we are broadly unaware of, but which will come out later, the way the whole sexual awareness thing has. (Assuming that civilisation survives.) I am thinking that sociopathy is one. So many hateful, anti-social humans in our midst. In 2040, will people be saying “How could they not have been aware of how sick and violent so many of the characters were in the naive 2020s?”
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There were kids that we were pretty sure were gay in high school, but neither my brother nor I ever engaged in queer-baiting. In fact, as fellow outcasts with no desire to be part of the “in” crowd we tended to hang out with them.
One of those guys we hung out with came out after graduation, moved to New York City, became a professor of theater, and started blogging as The Rude Pundit.
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Oh yeah, regarding teachers and kids today, as you recall I taught for a couple of years. I had to make sure that there was always another adult with me if I was ever alone with a kid. I actually had a kid threaten to say that I diddled him if I disciplined him, I said “go ahead, I’m a member of the teacher union, we prosecute false reports. Your momma is on probation, do you want her to go back to jail?” I was bluffing, of course. If he’d made a false report I would have been moved to another school in the district while the district investigated, which is why there was an epidemic of that in that school district whenever a parent didn’t like a teacher and the teacher union made that threat to start referring for prosecution.
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